Essential Phone Sees Another $50 Price Cut, Down $250 Since Launch
Paying $699.99 for the Essential Phone? Ain't nobody got time for that. If you shelled out the full asking price of the smartphone on pre-order or early at launch, the bad news for you today is that the price of the smartphone has gone down again, with Best Buy chopping anther $50 off the asking price for the phone as it tries to move stock. With the additional $50 off, the smartphone is now selling for $449.99.
The father of Android, Andy Rubin, and his company, Essential, certainly didn’t expect to be here with the fancy new device. The smartphone launched as a Sprint carrier exclusive, which was not a good idea. Pair a new device from a new company with the least popular major carrier out there and you aren’t setting yourself up for robust sales. Word is that only 5,000 Essential phones had sold via Sprint between launch and late September.
We have no idea how many units Essential sold directly, but considering not long after launch the company cut the price of the Essential phone directly from its website, sales couldn't have been that good. Essential began to sell the unlocked device directly at a price of $499 last month. Only a few days before Essential slashed its pricing on the smartphone, Best Buy had reduced the price to $599.99.
Essential tried to make the price cut up to buyers with the offer of a friends and family discount that would net people who had previously purchased a device another $200 off a second smartphone bringing the price down to $299. The problem Essential has now is that as quickly as prices are being slashed on the smartphone, it's hard to pony up the money when odds are the device will be getting cheaper.
When the price gets down to the $350 range and sticks, this may just be the smartphone to have. It has the specs you would want to see a flagship device, including a 5.7-inch screen with very narrow bezels. The display has a resolution of 1312 x 2560, features a Snapdragon 835 paired with 4GB of RAM and the smartphone has 128GB of storage. One of the nicest upsides is that it has stock Android for the OS.
